First of all, there is a symbolic amputation: this is not a love story. Not even letters. Not even redemption. This is a hemorrhage contained in paper, so maybe it bleeds slowly, like a razor forgotten in the inside pocket of a jacket. The kind you come back to when you’ve lost the fight. People have told me more than once that writing love letters is a sign of weakness. I disagree. Weakness is pretending you don’t feel it. Weakness is memorizing speeches about detachment while dreaming of a touch that no longer exists. Weakness is having words and not using them. Loving is something else, it’s a kind of permitted violence, a vice that cannot be rehabilitated. I don’t know if I’ve ever loved. Of course you have, that’s stu-pid. Of course I have, otherwise I wouldn’t be writing this book. In fact, I don’t even know if what I felt was love, or if it was just a well-dressed need, with Italian shoes and ironic promises that life made to me. I just know that I wrote it. And that was enough. Writing has always been my way of pretending to be alive. And if there are letters in this book, it’s because there were silences too dense to bear. ...